The Jayson Blair Times Descends Into Madness

THE TYGRRRR EXPRESS
The Jayson Blair Times Descends Into Madness
January 18, 2008 at 10:09 am (POLITICS) · www.blacktygrrrr.wordpress.com

The Jayson Blair Times is descending into madness. It is now officially the equivalent of a drug addict unable to come clean. It is in a downward spiral, and it is determined to drag everybody down until there is nothing good in America left. We can argue over whether it takes a village to raise a child, but it seems that it only takes a newspaper to burn the village.

http://blacktygrrrr.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/the-collapse-of-the-jayson-blair-times-palestinian-style/

For the sake of full disclosure, for those who truly do need to be hit upside the head with a bar towel to know they are in a bar, I find the paper formerly known as the New York Times to be a contemptible piece of trash run by disgusting individuals that long ago gave up on concepts such as honor and integrity.

I want to make it crystal clear that my objection to this paper is not political. I disagree with liberals. I detest the JBT. I detest the fact that they will allow blind partisan hatred to get in the way of making America happier, healthier, and safer.

I am a conservative blogger. Yet if you are a liberal, you will be welcome on my blog. You will not be castigated. I will treat you politely. We will disagree, but you will be welcome as would any guest in my home. When watching football on Sundays, I know some of the guys sitting on my couch are liberals. They know they have a place to watch the game. I want my blog to be equally welcoming.

The JBT would rather destroy than reach out. They are sinking in readership because they have taken so many repugnant actions that only their most ardent ideological warriors will read them.

Some people will bemoan the state of politics today. They will say it has gotten coarser. We were better off before Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the blogosphere lit up society. Things were so much more peaceful “back then.”

No, society was not more peaceful. There was not harmony. Debate was merely stifled. When a liberal says, “Be bipartisan,” what they really mean is, “Shut up and agree with me.” The New York Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, and NPR rules with iron fists…iron liberal fists. Conservatives were simply not allowed to speak. The debate is coarser today because liberals have not been able to silence and bully the conservatives back underground.

Yes, there are plenty of strident conservatives out there. They will argue that they were bullied, so therefore they have every right to get down and dirty. This is wrong. This is how entire groups of people who have been victimized in the past seek vengeance rather than justice. Some people run for President fueled by this vengeance. What conservatives should do is what most of them are already doing. Do not get in the gutter, but be a worldwide group of ombudsmen that expose every liberal lie. This is a full time job when it comes to the JBT, but here are some examples of how they have sunk.

They became the JBT by promoting Jayson Blair himself. He was unqualified, and incompetent. He continued to rise in the ranks, passing over better qualified and longer tenured caucasian employees.

Affirmative action is a sensitive issue. I have enraged many conservatives myself by not being rabidly against it. Yet at the same time, promoting Jayson Blair hurt everybody. The critics of affirmative action made him the poster boy in an attempt to destroy an entire structure meant to help people. Where the JBT went wrong is that they sacrificed quality in favor of ideology. There are plenty of capable black people in America, a majority of them liberals. Instead of picking somebody who happened to be black, they picked somebody because he was black.

Yet the Jayson Blair imbroglio was a molehill. Other scandals have been mountains.

In 2004, Mary Mapes and Dan Rather used their powerful positions at CBS to try and bring down President Bush. In conjunction with the JBT, memos that were “fake but accurate” made it on the air. If the new media did not exist, John Kerry would have won the election. That in itself is not the tragedy, since many people wanted him to win. The real horror would have been when the scandal erupted after he was sworn in. His Presidency would have been paralyzed. It would have made Monicagate seem like child’s play. America would have been irreparably harmed.

Yet just because President Bush was reelected does not mean we can all say, “no harm, no foul.” Attempted murder is not murder, but it is still awful. Whether or not President Bush shirked his military duties would have been a legitimate story if there was hard evidence. CBS and the JBT let ideology trump quality, and let emotion override facts. They continued to hasten the destruction of their own brands.

If trying to rig an election was sinister, then trying to get innocent Americans killed was bordering, if not crossing over, the line of good and evil.

The JBT has gone beyond reporting the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. They have openly cheered for America to lose. This is treason. It is sedition.

Some may ask how an inanimate object can hurt or harm anything. This inanimate object has a flesh and blood owner. His name is Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr. Pinch Sulzberger has a long history of despising his own nation. Like all rich children of guilty white liberals, he managed to join the counterculture. Unlike others who took part in that wretched movement of drug loving hippie excess, he never grew up. While his father, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., was a liberal, even he had his limits. He asked his son who he would want to die in a conflict between an American soldier and a Vietnamese soldier. Pinch replied, “The American soldier should die because we invaded his country. The Vietnamese soldier is just defending himself.”

One does not have to support a war to wish that our soldiers come home safely. Pinch has continued his warped thinking to this very day. On the day that Iraqis voted in their third democratic election, The JBT chose to break the wiretapping story involving the Bush White House. Reasonable minds can disagree on whether this was a story to begin with. Yet the story could have been reported one day earlier or one day later. It was not time sensitive. The day of the Iraqi election was historic. To give it short shrift was horrifying.

Yet even more horrifying was the JBT giving away secret troop movements, endangering the lives of American soldiers. This is not about right vs left. It is about right vs wrong. Our troops may overwhelmingly vote republican, but they conduct their missions with honor, regardless of who at any moment in history is their Commander in Chief. Those who say they “support the troops” cannot condone this activity. These young men and women should not be blown to kingdom come because one man is against war in principle and American victory in practice. Ideology has blinded him. There is no decency left.

In the last few days alone, there have been three more big black eyes at the Gray Lady.

The first is mild in comparison. It involves the furor of the paper in general for hiring commentator Billl Kristol, who happens to be a conservative. Notice I did not refer to him as “conservative commentator Bill Kristol.” He is a human being first, and I do not recall the Wall Street Journal refer to “liberal columnist Al Hunt,” when he was a columnist there. That is because the WSJ was able to place quality above ideology. This allowed it to export both.

Daniel Finkelstein, the editor of the Times of London, wrote a brilliant article questioning why a movement obsessed with diversity would object to a columnist offering ideological diversity.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/01/an-open-letter.html

The reason is because that type of diversity is frowned upon.

“A quality newspaper should have columns reflecting a wide variety of opinions, even those uncongenial to the majority of its readers. While the bulk of a paper’s columnists may reflect the publication’s character and view, there must always be space for an alternative opinion.”

Apparently Mr. Finkelstein believes the JBT is reasonable.

“Considering that Kristol represents a large strand of American opinion (even if it is a smaller strand of NYT reader opinion) it is entirely unremarkable that his columns should be commissioned.”

This is because ideology is what they want, quality is irrelevant. Expanding the readership is only irrelevant for people who want to grow their business. Judging by the collapsing stock price, Pinch simply does not care about increasing circulation.

“The job of a reader’s editor, surely is to defend the rights of its readers, all of its readers. It is not to start picking a “Fantasy Columnist” team to reflect his own politics. What of people who agree with Kristol? Do they not deserve the protection of the reader’s editor?”

Clark Hoyt, the ombudsman at the JBT, did not want Mr. Kristol hired because he had the nerve to criticize the paper in the past. Internal dissension is healthy. It avoids groupthink. Come to think of it, the very things that the JBT has accused the Bush Administration of being guilty of is what has affected the JBT itself.

Mr. Hoyt stated, “This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.”

Mr. Finkelstein’s reply was brief, to the point, and deadly accurate.

“Isn’t this the most pompous sentence you have ever read in your life?”

This is the JBT mindset. They have between one and two million readers, and think that 7 billion people agree with them. Even for liberals, this is too much arrogance.

The second black eye is a repeat of 2004. Many people feel that Rudy Giuliani is the strongest republican candidate (Disclosure: I am supporting Rudy Giuliani for President). While many on the left and right are not fans of Rudy, he was the frontrunner in the polls for some time. Then a scandal broke about secret service protection for his mistress, now his wife, Judi Nathan. In the end, there was no scandal. The expenditures were legal, and charged to the appropriate account.

So no harm, no foul, right? Wrong. The scandal was on the front page. The retraction was on page 37. Rudy Giuliani might still become President, but if he does not, that scandal is what sent him down in the polls. The JBT failed to get President Bush in 2004, but they fired their guns on Mayor Giuliani, and derailed a strong republican…and more importantly, a staunch advocate of an aggressive continuation of the War on Terror. Ideology reigns supreme, and any man further to the right of President Bush with regards to the Bush Doctrine must be destroyed.

Yet if attacking one man falsely is disgusting, continuing to disparage our troops is vile.

The newest story slandering the troops comes in the form of the JBT Claiming that 121 murders have been committed by American troops returning home to American soil. This is to show returning soldiers as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder induced crazed, murderous lunatics. The story has already been debunked, since when taken as a percentage, American civilians who have not served in the military are 5 times more likely to commit murder. Soldiers are better behaved, more disciplined, and less violent. They are not “killing machines.” They are humanitarians who love America, and defend our citizens. To portray the entire group as murderers is to hate the troops.

It is not that the JBT is liberal. It is that they are pernicious, wrong, and unapologetic. They get the story wrong, issue mealy mouthed apologies, and continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. Sometimes honest mistakes happen. More often than not, the paper engages in deliberate smears.

It is no wonder that the JBT and its ever dwindling number of readers despise Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and their less popular brethren. The JBT repeatedly lies. They have always lied. Only in recent years are they getting caught.

The New York Post does not have this problem. The Wall Street Journal does not have this problem either. It is not that they are conservative. It is that they are obsessed with getting the news right. Not right politically, but right accurately. On the rare occasions they make mistakes, they issue loud mea culpas. They also have liberal columnists, or to be more accurate, columnists that happen to be liberal. They are not token hires. They simply write well.

My blog will succeed because my belief in conservatism, while strong, is secondary to my obsession with integrity. I will be wrong from time to time. I will blow a story. Yet I will place the value of my brand above my pride.

I will not allow myself to become the conservative equivalent of the JBT, because conservatives have to be thrice as good as liberals to survive. The main stream media loves to show conservatives fouling things up, so they can claim that everybody does it. I will not fall into that trap.

The JBT will continue to rot from its arrogant liberal head. They prefer madness to goodness. Quality is job zero. They will burn the village, and yes, some decent republicans will get singed. Yet the JBT will be burning right next to them, their own reputation burnt to a crisp, tattered and charred.

Conservatives will be better when the Gray Lady gets euthanized. Liberals will not realize this until later on, but they will be better off as well. Society will be better.

The JBT is the politics of personal destruction. The debate will be less coarse when they expire worthless. This will not eliminate liberalism. Another liberal publication will take their place, obsessed with avoiding the same mistakes. They will choose honesty over treachery, and a rich, deep national debate can continue, free from hatred and lies.

I hope there are enough liberals that value integrity enough to prove me right.

eric

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